Trade Tech London 2012 the major technology fair for Capital Markets was a successful event for OneMarketData, as it has been over the past few years. We look forward to our annual booth-duty, catching up with old friends, past colleagues and meeting new acquaintances. This year was particularly eventful since we had big news with the announcement of major client wins. OneTick continues to be the platform of choice for global...

 
Some firms have the ability to recognize enormous value in an instant, those things that can provide tremendous business benefit and bottom-line profitability.  The fiercely competitive trading industry is a place where the right technology and solutions can mean the difference between success and failure. Achieving that bottom line profit margin when faced with increasing competition, thinner margins and a lower risk appetite is every firm’s goal, ultimately to be...

 
Last week I attended the North American Trade Architecture Summit (NATAS), a Waters conference on high-frequency trading, real-time risk and of course Big Data. I was a panelist on a session entitled: “Overcoming the Big Challenge of Big Data in Finance”. From the size of the crowd it was the highlight of the day-long conference.   I have to give credit to the panel organizers for bringing together a diverse group of experts; my fellow panelists...

 
This article first appeared in Waters Technology High-Frequency Trading special report.
A trading firm’s final goal is to win, to be successful in outpacing the market. Trading firms operate in a fiercely competitive industry where success is measured by profit. They are constantly hunting for talent and technology to achieve that goal. Yet firms are ever threatened by fierce competition, controlling costs, rapidly advancing technology and menacing regulation acting like a...

 
Transaction Cost Analysis is the idea of monitoring and reporting on trade performance. Certainly not a new concept in the trading industry. Brokers, EMS and OMS vendors have been providing this capability for a quite a while.  Yet, it is just as common for the buy side, sell-side and quantitative trading firms to build their own analysis platforms. They are creating complex TCA platforms leveraging modern technology such as OneTick’s CEP, high performance tick database and...

 
In the winding path of a long career I once had a colleague that worked in the standards-based software industry. Like a lot of vendors, he was actively engaged in creating commercial software implementations based on the fully sanctioned Java standards. I once asked him, “How do you compete against other vendors when you’re all reading the same specification and creating the same thing?” His response, while simple and understandable has always stuck with me. His top...

 
This article first appeared on Markets Media Experts page on February 02, 2012. The salient fact is that Big Data is messy. Financial practitioner’s worst fears are spending more time processing and cleaning data than analyzing it. The vast hordes of data demand a devotion to the collection and management of a multiplicity and diversity of markets across assets and continents.
Chris Pickles, BT’s Head of Industry Initiatives -Global Banking & Financial Markets recently...

 
This article first appeared at the launch of the Big DataforFinance site from the A-Team Group.
Trading volume for U.S. listed options totaled about 4.55 billion contracts in 2011 while OPRA’s message volume has been steadily increasing at an annual rate around 40%. To say that the options market is all about Big Data is like noting that Mount Everest is all about snow. It states the obvious but also the ominous. On a human scale, you cannot consume or make sense of...

 
“Groups of people are generally not nearly as moved by rational argument as by rhetoric which stirs the emotions.”
When a definition is elusive, more subjective in nature than objective should that not dictate more discretion and a rational approach to achieve a goal?  When the CFTC’s Scott O’Malia set out to define high frequency trading through a seven-part test, definition was not his objective but simply a means to an end.  That end...

Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it. -David Starr Jordan, Past-president of both Indiana University and Stanford University This past week I attended the Quant Invest conference, a show targeting quantitative trading, risk management and regulation. I moderated a technology-focused panel with a distinguished cast from numerous quant trading firms.  In our conversation we explored the challenging choices those founders and managing...